Justice seems to inspire the cinema, and if trial films are often missed, the news comes to deny this bad omen with the release, this Wednesday, of Anatomy of a fall, by Justine Triet, Palme d’or 2023, while waiting for The Goldman Trial, by Cédric Kahn (theatrical release on September 27), which also impressed a lot at the last Cannes Film Festival.
Première Affaire, the first film by Victoria Musiedlak, in competition at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, stops at the gates of the Assize Court to lead us into its back kitchens: the filthy premises of a police station, the walls gray of a prison visiting room. A young associate of a Parisian business firm, Me Nora Aït (Noée Abita) has just left a nightclub, with her girlfriend and the promise of a serious hangover, when her boss, Me Édouard Saint-Brieux ( François Morel, impeccable in the role of the wily old lawyer to whom we do not make it) calls him.
She must go to the North with all business ceasing, for police custody. Yes right now. No, it can’t wait, it’s custody. Nothing complicated there. She has “never done a criminal”? The time has come to tackle it.
Nora rushes down the highway, in evening dress, half-zombie, to reach the Arras police station where the judicial machinery has been triggered. A young woman has disappeared, Jordan (Alexis Neises, as touching as it is disturbing), barely of age, is suspected. He’s been stripped of his shoelaces, he’s still being told “you”, while he’s being notified of his rights. But as soon as it comes to his schedule, the interviewer (Anders Danielsen Lie) goes to familiarity.
Nora walks into this tense behind closed doors when the cop draws a card from his deck – a cop always has a card in his deck. The victim hasn’t just been abducted; she was massacred with an iron bar, before being left for dead in a wood. The facts are reclassified as murder. The policeman glues the photos of the forensic identification under the distraught eyes of the suspect, who lied about his schedule.
“Chanel’s body was discovered at the Champ des Loges, exactly where you were at 7:00 p.m., Jordan!” shouts the OPJ, banging his fist on the table. “Brigadier, and the presumption of innocence?” I would like you to stop the familiarity! the young office clerk shyly intervenes. “Do you think it’s really the familiarity that’s the problem? snaps the cop. First lesson…
Nothing is going well for the candid Me Nora Aït: the noose is dangerously tightening on her client, now in pre-trial detention; her mother, who left Algeria during the Dark Decade, seems ready to repudiate her when she sees her taking the side of evil (“I thought you were a financier?”).
As for her boss, he intimates to her, after having embarked her in this galley, to return to more juicy files: “It’s exciting, the cops, but it’s wasted time, less fees and a lot trouble for the cabinet. »
Première Affaire is not a detective film, even if it has the color and flavor of one. The criminal case that is camped there is only the support of an initiatory story in which a young woman discovers the darkness of the world, the essence of her job, so difficult, love and freedom, too, and the disappointments that go with it.
“We don’t care what you think. The customer’s truth is the truth. He says he’s innocent? So he is! reminds him of his boss. “I messed up, I suck, as a lawyer,” she laments as her client prepares to “hit her off.” All criminal lawyers will tell you: there is nothing more ungrateful than a “client”.
There is no doubt, now that reality has broken into her life, that the awkward and naive Nora Aït will do justice to her dress. “For me, Churchill’s phrase sums up my heroine’s entire journey: success is going from failure to failure, without losing enthusiasm,” observes director Victoria Musiedlak.
It is always moving to see, in the cinema, a young actress reveal herself. Noticed in Ava, another first film by Léa Mysius (2017), Noée Abita bursts onto the screen in her role as a young litigant who has not seen anything yet but has plunged, pushed by circumstances, into the deep icy bath of the life.
Première Affaire, by Victoria Musiedlak, with Noée Abita, Anders Danielsen Lie, Alexis Neises, François Morel…., 1h38, released in 2024.
